


Knowledge Locked in a Tower

by feralphoenix



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, F/F, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mild Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 02:57:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/605045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The accounts of Aranea Serket, junior Librarian, freshly promoted to maintaining its great archives, sworn to a life of glorious service in the blessed name of the Muse.</p><p>(Or: Aranea and stories and the two girls she loves just as much as them.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knowledge Locked in a Tower

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Laraloopy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laraloopy/gifts).



> _(tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, forgot._ – the chains that had bound you are now obsolete)

The room is dark, and it is wide. The hymns of initiation roll from wall to wall and echo up to the arched ceiling, and through your closed eyelids you watch the vague red patterns of flickering firelight. The only other sound is the creak of chain as the thurible sways slowly, back and forth, wafting smoke and the smell of incense all around you.

You fold your hands at your lap. Blood beats at your fingertips, in your lips. You are trying to make your mind blank like the acolytes instructed, but in a dark corner of your head there’s still nervousness buzzing, faint. You shouldn’t be nervous. You have been working in and around the Library for years; all your research and your knowledge has been confirmed as adequate preparation by the directors, or else you wouldn’t have been able to push for this so quickly.

But the nervousness remains. This seems to be the way of you and feelings: They hang about without rhyme or reason until you acknowledge them. Your initiation has drawn the flutter up into your chest. It reminds you, irrationally, of Meenah.

That makes you feel better, a bit. You hold yourself straight and disciplined, listen to the low susurrus of the song, and think of Vriska.

There’s nothing for you to regret.

 

 

 

You first met Meenah in elementary school, where you were in the same class every year. The place you both went was prestigious, of course, the best of the best. On your first day, you wore a bow in your freshly combed hair and your favorite patent leather Mary Janes. There was not a single crease in your uniform. Meenah, of course, came to school with perfect shiny penny loafers and her hair in waves like a diminutive beauty pageant queen, and left school with lost jacket buttons and great scuffs of mud on her shoes and grass stains on her skirt and socks.

Both of you attracted attention from the start: You because you compulsively jumped in to correct teachers’ spelling and told history like it was rather than the cheery whitewashing your textbooks presented. Meenah because she knew more swear words than most high schoolers and punched students who dared to cross her.

By the end of your first week, you were both pariahs: Meenah for being a bully, you for being insufferable and a know-it-all. You escaped with a lot of dirty looks from your fellow students and from the staff. Teachers everywhere hovered on the verge of pulling their hair out over Meenah, but one couldn’t very well expel a princess from the most expensive school in the district. It simply wasn’t done.

You remember Meenah being very good at mathematics even then. It was her saving grace, in the midst of teenager-worthy attitude and horrible fish puns and a terrible habit of punching first and asking questions later.

“Money and numbers go together,” she said, and grinned, showing absolutely as many teeth as she could manage. The effect had been ruined, a bit, by the fact that she was cutting her second set of teeth and therefore missing several. “’S not like I’m into it just for the halibut.”

You aren’t sure, even now, why she took exception to you and treated you like the two of you were somehow fellows. Maybe it was just a shared understanding of the fallibility of adults, and an unwillingness to let it slide, though Meenah rebelled for the sake of rebelling and you just did not like it when people were wrong.

But you do know why you found yourself liking her, even against your own will. Meenah had charisma, just like any princess worth her salt ought. She had a wicked sense of humor, and unfortunately she was funny even when she was saying awful things. And even though she always complained when you got long-winded, she behaved like your words had weight.

 

 

 

When you get home, you have to juggle your keys and purse to get the door open. You leave both atop the washing machine, push the door closed with your hip, and wrap both arms around Vriska again with no small relief. She’s gotten bigger, and your arms are flexible from sorting and organizing books but they are not very strong. She’s dead weight besides—her little fingers are kneading at your shirt and her eyes are open, but her gaze is vacant. It was a lot of tranquilizers, and she’s only one very little girl.

Everything is, at least, ready. Your new authority has gotten you all the help and resources you need, as promised, so you aren’t panicking as you might have been had you just gotten Vriska out and carried her home with no supplies or clothes or furniture for her. The feeling that’s thrumming under your ribcage is more like determination than nervousness.

You walk around the house with your coat and boots still on, even though it’s uncomfortably warm, and you talk Vriska through every room. She might not be taking very much in. You will probably have to repeat all of this tomorrow, when she’s lucid. You don’t mind, overmuch.

Finally, you bring her to her very own room and set her down on the bed. She’s still in her clothes, but even though she’s loopy with drugs, you don’t want to push her and change them for her. It would be best to leave that for her to do in the morning.

All the walking, rocking, and talking seems to have done its job: Vriska is dozing. You touch a curl of her hair, lightly. It’s thick and springy like yours, and soft now that it’s been washed properly. You won’t have to see it matted and greasy again, and you’re glad down to the marrow of your bones.

You pick apart the double-knotted laces of her red sneakers, tuck your tongue between your teeth and slip them off her feet to place onto the floor. That’s all there is left for you to do; you stand and walk backwards pace by pace to the doorframe, turn down the lights, close the door. Sigh a little.

She’ll be all right for a while. She won’t wake up until morning after that dose of tranquilizers, so you’ll only need to check on her once or twice before you go to bed too.

That’s all as well. Settling Vriska into the household is going to require time and energy, and you have a lot of research to do for your first job. You should probably get to it.

 

 

 

In middle school, Meenah officially passed her status as heir to the throne to her little cousin Feferi. There was a bit of a hubbub about it in the news, and a lot of adults sighing in relief. Meenah started racking up detentions, and got her ears and eyebrows pierced. You might have thought vaguely that the gold and the little pink jewels were beautiful against her dark skin, like yellow stars.

Some days after school she would go skateboarding with a girl named Latula, and sometimes she would hang around with you while you did your homework. She complained of boredom quite a lot, but she never left.

Once you asked her why, because you had wanted to get through your algebra equations in peace, and besides that you had an unabridged copy of _Les Misérables_ waiting for you at your house, which had to go back to the library in a week.

Meenah looked at you blankly, made a fist, and rapped your forehead very lightly with her knuckles.

“Serket, I was under the impression we was friends,” she said.

You adjusted your glasses, because she’d knocked them crooked. Meenah’s eyebrows were both thick black curves like punctuation, and her painted lips were pursed.

It occurred to you, freshly, that Meenah Peixes was the most ridiculous of your acquaintances by far. She had private tutors and she had a carefully studied punk dialect, and she made fish puns. Her most treasured possessions were her clam-shaped purse and her skateboard, which had defaced Squiddles decals slapped all over the underside. She had glued little rhinestones into the corners of her old-fashioned glasses and she baked the best cakes you had ever tasted.

It occurred to you, also, that you couldn’t even remember the last time someone had declared themselves to be your friend.

“Of course,” you said, and smiled despite yourself. “How silly of me.”

You went to the store after you left the park, her with her skateboard under her arm and you with your shoulder-strap bookbag under yours. You bought her a box of band-aids for the next time she skinned her knees trying a silly trick and she bought flour and sugar and blue sprinkles, and you put everything in one brown paper bag and each held one of the handles, and everything in the world was warm and soft for the afternoon.

(You wound up turning _Les Misérables_ in one day late. Meenah made fun of you for three days, until you hid a plastic tarantula in her gym clothes in the changing room. She still denies that she shrieked, but she was laughing about it within ten minutes.)

 

 

 

“How big a job can it _be?”_ Meenah asks. Her voice is tinny through the telephone. “You’re a librarian!”

“And I’ve been promoted,” you reply, shifting the phone to your other ear, “to helping to maintain the archives. The Library is very large, and although you might not think of it as such, it’s very important. I need to do research to ensure that I can do it properly, and it’s difficult to do anything intensive when I need to watch Vriska.”

“So, what, the shrimp’s getting into everything and getting you no rest?”

“…More or less.” Meenah must be proud of herself, you think, making sensible language into one of her puns seamlessly. “At least this means she’s recovering, but if she gets any more curious about her surroundings, I fear for the structural integrity of my house.”

There’s silence for a little bit. You can hear the thump of pillows on the floor from a few rooms over, and hope that Vriska isn’t going to break anything making that fort.

“For all you’re complaining,” says Meenah, “you shore sound like you’re smiling.”

You are. You play with your hair a little and smile a little more because Meenah noticed. “Well, for all that she is a miniature hellion, this still seems much more natural on her than hiding behind furniture and jumping at loud noises.”

Meenah’s quiet for a while again.

“But you still can’t get anemone work done with her bouncin’ off the walls, right?” she says slowly.

“No. Unfortunately.”

“I’m coming over,” she announces.

“What?” you say.

“Be there in fifteen minutes,” says Meenah, and hangs up.

She’s true to her word, and appears on your doorstep with an enormous duffel bag, grinning like a shark. Vriska zooms up the stairs when you let her in, a petite red-socked rocket, and Meenah situates herself on your (slightly disheveled) couch and plugs in her PlayStation 2 and begins playing video games with great aplomb.

She gives you a Meaningful Look, complete with grin and waggling eyebrows, so you decide to trust her (for now) and get out your laptop and notebooks, sitting at the kitchen table and glancing over to check on her every five or ten minutes.

It takes almost an hour, but finally Vriska comes down the stairs, mincing around the furniture until she’s at the far corner of the sofa, peeping over the back to watch Meenah play.

About twenty minutes after she ensconces herself, Meenah quite naturally offers her the second controller.

About half an hour after _that,_ the two of them have bonded over that time-tested friendship exercise, co-op mode.

Maybe someone else would be worried about a child picking up inappropriate language or being desensitized to violence from video games, but this isn’t the first time Vriska’s been exposed to either of these things. Besides, this will keep both of them out of trouble for a while. You put in headphones and focus your full attention on the biography of J.M. Barrie you have been failing to finish reading all day.

By five-thirty in the afternoon, you’re finished, and Meenah and Vriska are still playing video games. They’ve gone from a spy game you aren’t familiar with to something involving battling cars to an RPG. The two of them are shouting at each other and the television, and overall seem to be enjoying themselves, so you sit down next to them and ask Meenah if she’d like to stay for dinner.

Late at night, after Vriska has conked out from all the video games and the size of dinner, which included Meenah baking some fish and making brownies (you contributed side dishes), you and Meenah do dishes while Vriska sleeps on the sofa.

“Cute kid,” Meenah says.

“Thank you for coming,” you tell her, and hold her free hand under the spray of hot water. “I was able to get everything done thanks to you, and I think Vriska likes you. If you’d like, you can keep coming over whenever you please.”

“You shore you’re not gonna get sick a’ my face by then?” she asks, grinning.

“Certainly not. You should be happy about this too, because this is as close as we’re getting to going out together until I find someone Vriska can stand to babysit her.”

Meenah swears a little. You smile.

 

 

 

You and Meenah got your work permits as soon as you got into high school. She jumped back and forth between different jobs: A cook at a restaurant, a tattoo artist, a lifeguard. She told you over-the-top stories over cafeteria lunches, peppered with curses and her ridiculous puns. You nearly choked on three separate occasions.

As for you—you’d never had any doubt about where you wanted to work, so you immediately applied for a low-ranking job at the Library. They might not ordinarily have accepted a fifteen-year-old, but then your great-aunt had made great contributions to the archives, and that seemed to work in your favor. It was a privilege, and an unfair one: You were aware of this, but you wanted so much to help. You had never wanted anything so much in your life. If you started early, then once you were out of college you would probably have risen high enough to start archival work, and you had been dreaming about that since you were a tiny child sitting at your great-aunt’s ankles and listening to her tales.

“That is so glubbing _boring,”_ Meenah proclaimed. “A library? Seriously.”

“It’s a special library,” you said. You might not ever be able to make her understand—you knew that even then. “And you know how much I love stories.”

“More like how much you love the sound of your own voice,” Meenah said.

You looked at her big rough hands peeling the paper off of a straw. She was wearing seven separate rings, and you didn’t doubt that they were all solid gold.

You thought that there were a few other things you wanted, nearly as much as the Library, but that getting them would be the problem.

 

 

 

It was simply inevitable that you come to work at the Library, because Serkets have always maintained the Library, all the way through the far reaches of memory. The spider sigil on your signet ring, the treasured heirloom passed down to you by your great-aunt when she died, is a sign that you see sometimes as you walk its proud, arched halls.

You think it’s natural. A Serket has always been a storyteller, a pirate, a Freemason, an abbess, a thief; plundering and guarding and passing down knowledge as just another treasure. Leaving their tracks in new narratives that spring up around their great deeds.

Perhaps a Serket was there at the founding of the Library, or perhaps a Serket stole inside it not knowing its true nature and simply becoming swept up in the grandeur of it, learning at last that the Library itself is the greatest of all treasures. History, even the history of the Library, does not clearly remember. Perhaps you can restore that story, one day.

Your name is Aranea Serket, and you are named for Ariadne, whose story was your great-aunt’s lifelong labor of love. She passed away a few years after finally finishing its restoration, and her archival and maintenance has ensured that barring some slew of new adaptations it won’t need a touch-up for at least a decade.

Vriska is named for your great-aunt’s very first maintenance project, a Japanese fairy tale about a scorpion. You read it to her at the end of the first week she spent at your house. It made her cry.

“The scorpion didn’t do anything wrong,” she protested, frustrated. “Why’d it have to sacrifice itself and die when it didn’t do anything wrong? It just wanted to live.”

You stroked her hair and you talked about the story together until she fell asleep.

You’ve chosen Peter Pan because it’s a story Vriska will enjoy, and because you wouldn’t in good conscience be able to read it to her without some manner of maintenance or restoration first.

She loves pirates, though, and adventure. She’s a Serket to the very heart of her, even in the face of everything that’s been done to her, and that makes you very proud.

One day, when she’s older and can understand, you want to tell her the story of the Library itself.

 

 

 

You first kissed Meenah Peixes at a Latula Pyrope party near the beginning of your junior year of high school. It was late September and the night air had that distinctly autumn taste of smoke to it; you think it was a little past midnight, but you aren’t sure because there was no clock out on the porch. The watch you had worn that day was analog, and it was too dark out to read the hands.

You had slipped outside because the strobe lights and bass-heavy music were beginning to give you a headache, and because you didn’t much trust the drinks—maybe some of your year-mates were brave enough to drink the punch even after Cronus Ampora had been found in the crowds (and ejected on his ear thereafter), but not you. The soda was in cans, which were harder to slip liquor and other unsavory drugs into, but keeping one hand and one eye on one’s drink at all times was difficult and in any case you were not a habitual partygoer.

It was cold out on the porch, anyway, in a way that made you wish for a steaming cup of tea or coffee. Your dress was thin, so you wrapped your arms around yourself. You wondered, a little bitterly, why you had even been invited to this party anyway. You and Latula were not particularly close. You were only here because Meenah was here, and someone needed to look after her, but she’d lost you in the crowds half an hour ago and you’d been unable to find her since.

The door opened behind you with a creak. You jumped a little.

“Yo, chill,” said Meenah. “It’s just me.”

Irritation crept up your chest, and you tried to let go of it with a sigh. You couldn’t put her on a leash and expect to keep her that way. People didn’t work like that. Especially not Meenah.

“Pyrope wanted some quality time with her shelly boyfriend,” she informed you. “Maryam’s AWOL too, probably off mackin’ on some girl or somefin. So I was wonderin’ where you’d disappeared to.”

“Ah,” you said. Your voice might have been a little sour when you added, “It’s nice to be remembered.”

“Nofin to _sulk_ over,” said Meenah amiably.

You both fell quiet, the only noises being the thrum of the bass from inside and the occasional thump from upstairs. You tried not to think about whether that was Latula or Porrim. You looked instead at Meenah, which was a mistake: She was still thin and bony as a rail at almost seventeen, but her worn bomber jacket was hanging open, and her thin breasts pushed up against her tube top. Moonlight fell against the gap of skin between shirt and low-slung pants, and made you want to reach out and touch.

“I didn’t mean to ditch you or nofin,” Meenah went on. She was almost half a head taller than you at that age, having hit a surprise second growth spurt at the tail end of eighth grade, which lasted through most of ninth. You were inching up on her, bitterly slowly, and you were sure that any day now you’d stop and be shorter forever. “But it’s a party, I mean, what’s the point of comin’ if you don’t want to have fun?”

“As long as you were enjoying yourself, then that’s good,” you said.

Meenah frowned and scratched her head. She had taken to wearing her hair short aside from a couple of long rattails, and you liked the cap of mad curls it gave her. Her piercings and rings caught the starlight and glittered. You thought it made her look like she was wearing a handful of constellations.

“Guess this means this was a fishtank of a date,” she said. Paused. “You know, fishtank as in ‘to tank a thing’.” As if you weren’t already used enough to the puns to decipher her meaning.

“I will admit that I’m not much of a party person,” you said, choosing not to comment on her feeble wordplay.

She hip-checked you lightly.

“Then it’s okay to say you’re not comin’, dunkass,” she said gently.

You sighed, because Meenah really did not understand anything. “If you can get someone else to be your chaperone, perhaps I’ll consider it.”

Meenah made a noise through her nose.

At some point while the two of you stared into the night sky, you began holding hands. You loved the shape of hers, how she had long fingers and how the bones arched up and pushed against her skin. They were rough, and when she made fists they seemed to have a perfect shape for punching people. You also liked that she never held your hands too hard, especially since it hurt to have one’s fingers squeezed from both sides by rings.

“Maybe we should just go ahead and leave,” you said.

Meenah was quiet for a moment, apparently thinking about it.

“Yeah, it’d shella suck to be here if the cops show up on a bust,” she said. “Pretty sure somebody or other’s spiked that punch.” Another brief silence. “How ‘bout we go pick this up at, I dunno, a coffee shop or something.”

“That sounds bearable,” you told her.

You looked at each other for a while, and the moment was very, very tense, and then you both leaned in at the same time like magnets.

Meenah’s mouth was hot. Her lips tasted like slightly chewed-on lipstick. When she opened yours with her tongue, you felt the jolt all the way down to your stomach, and you suddenly wanted her hands on you. That immediacy, that desire startled you quite a lot, but you remember clearly the fearlessness that kept you from pulling away.

“Aight,” said Meenah after she lifted her face, “let’s blow this fishstick stand.”

You wound up staying at Starbucks until it closed, buying one of everything in the pastry bar and dipping your biscotti into each other’s drinks. Meenah made fun of what she called the “hipster music” that the store played and made you giggle until you snorted. You even went dutch.

 

 

 

When the day arrives, you opt to leave Vriska with Porrim. Meenah wouldn’t mind, you think, but Porrim will be better at keeping her safe and out of trouble, and will have more of an idea of what to do if Vriska winds up lonely. She has her little Kanaya, too, whom Vriska seems to get along with well enough despite the terrible clash of interests between them.

“I’ll be at work until early tomorrow morning, and I’ll come to pick her up then,” you say. Vriska is already inside, thumping her backpack down on the floor and yelling a high-pitched greeting to Kanaya. There are little girl squeals from a room deeper into the house than you can see. “You probably won’t be able to reach me, but I imagine Meenah will be happy to assist if you need anything; she knows Vriska’s schedule.”

“They do seem to enjoy each other’s presence,” Porrim says, and smiles.

You try to smile back, and hope that your face isn’t too red. You’re comfortable in your relationship with Meenah, but Porrim is lovely and has always affected you. She affects _everyone,_ and she seems to be serenely used to it. Once in middle school you had the most awful crush on her, only made worse by the way that Porrim had flirted with you. You’d discussed this with Meenah at the time expecting to be made fun of; unexpectedly, she commiserated with you instead. Venus di Milo and Helen of Troy have nothing on this woman.

“If I don’t get back,” you say, and swallow a little, “in time—look after her?”

Porrim keeps smiling, but a little crease forms between her eyebrows. “You make it sound as though you’re afraid of being killed in a great bookshelf collapse, Aranea. I would certainly look after Vriska in the case of such an eventuality—with Meenah’s help, of course, as she wouldn’t want to be left out.”

You sigh and roll your shoulders, a gesture to fill the air and cover your inability to explain. “I’m sure I must sound foolish.”

She rests a hand on your shoulder, tilts her head to the side. “No, you sound like you love Vriska and worry about her. Which means you’re doing the parenting thing correctly, and a good job looking after her besides.”

“I hope so,” you say. There’s a crash from inside Porrim’s house, where the girls are presumably playing; she doesn’t flinch and whirl around to watch. You don’t know how she does it.

“She’ll be all right with us for a day,” says Porrim. She reaches out and hugs you lightly. “Do your best at work; we’ll all be right here waiting for you to get back.”

That you can’t really explain to anyone doesn’t help your nerves, but you can trust Porrim with Vriska. That one fact lets you smile and bow your head a little and walk back through the cold to your car.

 

 

 

During the spring of your senior year in high school, you discovered that having sex with Meenah Peixes felt just exactly like being underwater. This was ironic in a number of ways, among them the fact that sex was one of the very few times Meenah ever gave it a rest with her horrible fish puns.

You felt weightless, shapeless, like the wind under her strong bony hands. She touched you like you were beautiful and fascinating, and you dimly admired the strong lines of her shoulders, her muscles, her sharp hip bones. She had a smattering of freckles on her stomach, thin scars on her elbows and knees, and the soles of her feet were pale as moons.

She didn’t sneer. She didn’t armor herself with bravado. Her jeweled brows came together, and she smiled faintly like she didn’t know she was doing it, and it was strange and funny that you could feel so candid and shameless in your own skin instead of gawky and fat and plain when it was Meenah, coltish Meenah who was neatly taking you apart with her dark hands.

She’d take you apart, slowly, until there was a buzz in your bones. And you’d braid your legs together with hers and finally she’d make noise, finally you’d pull the princess down from her throne, and it was nothing like a story.

Your head didn’t go white when it was over—it would take you less than half an hour to start feeling sticky and uncomfortable and want a shower—but then it was the _during_ that you wanted to last forever. The minutes when it was just you and Meenah and a dark lined with pale streamers like a pool at night.

 

 

 

At zero hour, you lower yourself into the chair and slip your headset on, gripping the plush leather armrests. Your vision is clear, and now before the activation you can see through the visor to the corners of the room. It’s the middle of the day outside, but in the Library it is cold and blue as an eternal night, with fires flickering in the sconces and illuminating silver spiders on the walls. Your clothes are warm and comfortable, your signet ring is hot on your finger, and shadows of monks and priests whisper across the far walls. The only sound is the distant echo of their hymns, rolling against the tall shelves like thunder.

You close your eyes, relax your body as best you can, and invoke the Muse in a whisper. A little tingle runs over your skin, like electric plasma has been injected straight into your blood vessels, just like you were taught it would be.

You open your eyes.

“Oh,” you say in delight, but you can’t hear your own voice over the sudden rush of wind.

Stories come from, and stories reflect, the conscious and the subconscious of people. As they are forged from the great collective, they are all interconnected:

And it’s this collective that spreads out before your eyes now, like a great spiderweb made out of stars. It’s the heart of this place, of everything that people are. It’s magic, or as close to it as people will ever get.

It’s all you can do to hold on to yourself, in this first great plunge, sinking into the black sea of space witchery. Because it is quite a lot like space, like clinging on to the side of a rickety shuttle to do repairs in an awkward crinkly white suit, where one false movement will send you spinning off into the beyond with no second chances. The weight of history is so intense that if you cannot keep firm hold of your own story, your mind will melt down to nothing. You will blur and dissolve, and not come back home ever again, and you would not be the first archive maintainer to die in this chair. More experienced archivists than you have met that fate.

You breathe. You are a Serket, and have been preparing since before you entered elementary school to maintain and create the archives of the Library. You were given the means to rescue and care for a small abused girl in exchange for your service, and when you return home you will have a self-important princess waiting in your bed, and neither of them know what you are doing in this place; they may spend their whole lives not knowing. Your bare feet touch the bottom; you raise your arms and open the control systems with the hymns thrumming against your ears.

A star is pulled down towards you, and close up you find that the great collective is a web within a web, because the core of light that makes up the Library’s memory of Peter Pan is a great ball of golden thread. You spin it open and apart, and it’s all delicately interwoven—bright cords connecting great knots of smaller spheres representing characters and plot points. Thinner tendrils, tiny stars that represent adaptations, criticisms, particularly acclaimed fan fiction, all intertwined with and offsetting the canon.

It isn’t your job—yet—to fit new information into the archive. As a maintainer, you are here to make sure that everything you see is correct: The text, the interconnections.

You filter through the threads, admiring how strong they are, like they’re made of braided diamond despite their gilded color. You flip over the information on Barrie’s biography first, make sure the tendrils attached to historical fiction’s interpretations of his life are affixed strongly, and stretch your hands out to turn the core dizzily until you can pick out plot points like berries. First star to the right. Pixie dust. The ticking crocodile. Captain Hook, who will of course become Vriska’s favorite when you return home and read the story to her. This will be the first year she is able to take part in Halloween, and you are sure she will want to be a pirate. Between Meenah and Porrim, you have no doubt that she will be the most dapper of sea rogues when October rolls around.

Your vision blurs, and you nearly lose the thread you were trailing through your fingers, but you swallow it into yourself, chase the projected image of your little girl between you and your lover and your friends down into your heart.

 

 

 

The thing about the story of Meenah Peixes and Aranea Serket is that it is a very ordinary story of two lives. She is a princess and you are a Librarian, but just like any other people who breathe and laugh and sleep, you have had boring days and dramatic ones.

Your story may never grace the Library’s archives. You’ve both caused ripples instead of waves: She gives people tattoos and does silly tricks with a skateboard; you shelter and cherish knowledge, and maintain it with all your might. If the world is to be changed, then let it be changed by Feferi and Vriska and Kanaya, and all the other children.

But that’s all right, because the Library’s archive reflects you anyway, across the mirrors of a million billion stories, every time a pair of characters turns to one another with love. And the Library will exist forever, until the sun goes red giant and swallows the very earth itself.

Fiction is the collective unconscious of the spirit: Just by reading a book or seeing a film or picking up a video game, one can live a hundred thousand lives all in one lifetime.

Your individual life is small. By giving yourself to the Library, you will live forever even in anonymity.

 

 

 

When you’ve tested every strand of the story, you reach out your hands, twist them at the wrists. The lovely golden web curls back together into a perfect sphere, which regains the luminescence of a star. The core shrinks down to the size of an apple or an orange. You reach out with ghostly hands, pluck it from the air, and press it to your chest.

It burns as it filters through you, burns out all interference, and you aren’t Ariadne at her loom now, you are the scorpion in reverse: It hurts, one painful shock, and sets off white fireworks inside your skull until you’re empty.

Flash memories fill in the whiteness and you grab onto them, tearing for a handhold, something to hold you intact, to keep you from vanishing here in the primordial sea.

Meenah’s freckles, standing out in the moonlight. Grass stains on her six-year-old knees. Your hands overlapping on the twisted twine handles of a paper bag, the inorganic taste of lipstick, the crunch of biscotti and tinny music. Meenah’s lovely hands unbuttoning your shirt with a quiet finesse and a near tenderness she’d usually never show. Meenah sitting on your couch, playing Twisted Metal 2 with Vriska and making fun of the outdated graphics, Meenah baking lemon snaps and snickerdoodles in your kitchen, Meenah checking Vriska’s math homework.

Vriska, Vriska, who you’d rescued with the power and authority of your position, Vriska, who’d lose the first adult who’d ever treated her like she was worth anything if you disappeared, Vriska who is probably making a glorious mess of the Maryam household right now, dragging Kanaya into some grandiose adventure in their imaginations, perhaps with Porrim playing along.

Your head breaks the surface of the endless sea.

You tread water for a moment, looking down into the glow of the underwater galaxy, and you sing the first line to the Muse’s blessings.

The world falls away.

When you blink, you realize you can see the distant walls of the Library, its dear shelves covered in volumes and volumes, the shadows of the workers and the worshippers, through the transparent display of your headset.

You reach up with limp arms and pull the thing off.

Your sense of time is shot: With the constant dim of the Library, you have no way of telling how long it’s taken you to get Peter Pan under control.

What you do know is:

(1) You were apparently successful, as you are not braindead;

(2) Your whole body is covered in sweat, and your clothes and hair are plastered straight to your skin;

(3) You are as wet as if you have spent the whole night with Meenah’s hands and mouth traveling the length of your body, and:

(4) You indeed feel as weightless and unbound and loose-muscled as if that’s indeed what you just finished up—all that’s missing is the particular tingle in your flesh of having been handled.

With titanic effort, you drape your headset over the arm of your chair and peel yourself out of it, inch by sticky inch of skin.

You slip your feet into your red patent leather Mary Janes, fumble around for your coat and wrap it around yourself before your sweat starts to chill your body. You walk, weaving and stumbling a little, out of the catacombs, through the halls, into the areas where visitors are still allowed. You pass the receptionist’s desk. She smiles warmly at you; everyone else who works here knows tonight was your first time. You nod, smile back, and with an effort do not pitch onto the floor.

It’s cold outside, and the sting of the small-hour wind wakes you up a little. You raise your chin, pull your coat more tightly about you, and go to find the car.

 

 

 

It’s nearly dawn when you finally reach Porrim’s house. The lights are still on, as promised. When you wobble up the sidewalk to ring the doorbell, she answers within a minute, elegant in a long black gown. The piercings in her eyebrow and lip make you ache to see Meenah again.

“I’ll have her in just a moment,” Porrim says, and she vanishes in a whirl of skirt only to reappear pulling Vriska by the hand. Your cousin is toddling along with her eyes mostly closed and her head drooping; she pushes up her glasses and rubs at her eyes every few steps.

“’M awake,” she says. “I waited.”

“Thank you,” you say, and hold out your tired arms. Vriska lifts hers, and you scoop her up. Her weight makes you feel like you’re going to buckle over backwards, and you would not let her go for a moment. “Let’s go home and get you to bed, now.”

You mouth _thank you_ over your shoulder a second time, for Porrim’s benefit. She just smiles until the corners of her eyes crinkle, waves, and closes the door.

 

 

 

Vriska is asleep not five minutes after you pull out of Porrim’s driveway. Her temple conks against the car door, and when you pass underneath a streetlamp her dark hair flashes blue-white. This makes it considerably harder to resist the temptation to pull over onto the shoulder and throw the car into park, so that you might simply look at her for much longer.

 

 

 

When you pull up to your own garage, there is someone sitting on the front step to your house.

It’s Meenah. She stands up and jogs into the garage at the same time you roll in and throw the car into park, dodging around the front bumper to open the passenger side door.

“Have you forgotten your key somewhere?” you ask, voice mild, as Meenah unbuckles Vriska and begins to lift her out of the car seat. “I can carry her, you don’t have to.”

“Like your noodle arms could,” Meenah replies without malice, squinting. “You look wiped. You’re all _clammy.”_

“I’ll get her backpack then,” you say. It isn’t worth poking at the pun.

“No, I’ll do that when you’re inside. You look like shit, Serket, no joke.”

“My job is more demanding than you think. You haven’t answered my question yet, Meenah.”

 _“Librarian,”_ she says with a disbelieving snort. Vriska stirs against her shoulder, and mercifully, she drops her voice to a stage whisper. “And I have not forgot my key, it’s in my ass pocket. It was just reely glubbing boring waitin’ up all night for you to get back.”

And she must have been waiting outside for a while—it’s cold, but you did not see her breath clouding as she sat on the stoop. You can’t help but smile.

“I suppose I’ll take you up on your backpack-carrying offer,” you say, and ascend the steps to open the foyer door. You slip out of your shoes and leave them neatly aligned on the mat. “Thank you for waiting up, as well.”

 “Long as you don’t talk my ear off aboat your day, shore, no prob,” says Meenah. “Imma go put the squirt down, so go ahead and take a shower or go to bed or whatev.”

You pause with your hand on the doorframe. “Meenah, are you sure you know the correct procedure for these things?”

“Extract shrimp from clothing, insert into jams,” Meenah lists. “You think I’m some kinda childcare idiot, don’t you? I know better than to wake her up. You ain’t the only one who cares about her.”

“I know,” you say. You do know. “Will you be coming to bed when you’re finished or will you go home, then?”

“Naw, I’m stayin’ a little longer,” says Meenah. “I, uh. Planned to make a little somethin’, to celebrate your first big success? But like, I got a primo case of ants in my pants and figured I might as well wait. The cake wasn’t gonna get finished any schooner if I stayed inside.”

“Why,” you say, “that is extraordinarily sweet of you, Miss Peixes.”

“Regular sugar cube, that’s me,” says Meenah.

You lean over Vriska’s head and shoulders and kiss her, wrapping your hand around the side of her neck where it meets her jawline. It’s soft and liquid, and you know you feel at home because she is here.

Your story isn’t an unusual one by any means. The both of you are perfectly ordinary, and your happiness is a very simple one. But just that Meenah is here, that she thinks of you and of Vriska, makes all your ordeals feel recompensed.

“I’ll leave everything to you, then,” you murmur when your lips separate from hers. You step back, shrug out of your coat and toss it onto the sofa. “And close the door, you’re letting all the cold air in.”

Meenah snorts, but you’ve already turned around. You hear it pushed carefully closed when you’re halfway up the staircase, and you smile.


End file.
